Category Archives: Energy-Environment

India: The costs of aligning with China

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The India Climate-Change Calculus

Aligning with China only undermines New Delhi’s negotiating position and costs its people dearly

By BRAHMA CHELLANEY

Wall Street Journal, December 31, 2009-January 3, 2010

China has been publicly excoriated by U.S. officials and others for opposing a binding climate-change deal at this month’s United Nations summit in Copenhagen. But the real loser was India.

By aligning itself with China’s negotiating position, India bracketed itself with the world’s largest polluting nation. This tack has been months in the works; back in October, New Delhi signed a five-year memo of understanding with Beijing and agreed, among other things, to present a united front in Copenhagen. Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh went so far as to declare there "is no difference" between the two countries’ negotiating positions.

Yet there is a huge difference in actual emissions. China is the world’s largest polluter, responsible for 24% of global carbon emissions. Most of these emissions are due to China’s economic development path, which has relied heavily on carbon-intensive, manufacturing industries. China’s per-capita carbon emissions are four times higher than India’s, which boasts the lowest per-capita emissions among all-important developing countries, at 26% of the world’s average.

China also doesn’t share India’s basic approach to curbing global warming. New Delhi wants per-capita emission levels and historic contributions to the build-up of greenhouse gases to form the objective criteria for any global carbon mitigation plan. China, as the world’s factory, wants a different formula that discounts carbon intensity linked to export industries.

Nor does India have much in common with other major developing nations, either in its carbon profile or industrial-development levels. For example, in 2007 (the latest figures available) India’s per-capita emissions totalled 1.2 tons; South Africa, 9.4; China, 4.8; and Brazil, 2.1, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

These facts argue for India to align itself with the least developed nations, which have lower emissions profiles. Yet the government of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh entered the Copenhagen negotiations joined at the hip with China, first by agreeing to put up a united front and then by following in Beijing’s footsteps to unveil a voluntary plan to slash its carbon intensity by 2020.

The move forced the U.S. to strike a watered-down deal with the developing-world bloc of Brazil, India, South Africa and China—rather than deal directly with the world’s largest polluter, China. The deal also committed India to "implement mitigation actions" open to "international consultations and analysis." Rather than focus on providing basic services—like electricity and safe drinking water—to the hundreds of millions of poor Indians who desperately need them, Mr. Singh also pledged to slash India’s emissions intensity by 20% "regardless of the outcome" in Copenhagen.

Past experience should have taught India that whenever it has joined hands with China on environmental issues, it has been let down by Beijing’s proclivity to jettison principles in the ruthless pursuit of self-interest. Take the 1989 Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer: China teamed up with India in the negotiations, only to reverse its stance and agree to abide by the protocol if it were compensated for the compliance costs. India was forced to follow suit.

In Copenhagen, India would have done better to delink itself from China and the other two leading developing nations and to encourage the world’s largest polluters—the U.S. and China—to do a deal.

India not only aligned itself with the wrong group, but also it presented itself inadvertently as a major global polluter by making common cause with China, whose developmental path threatens to unleash a carbon tsunami on the world. After all, had the situation in Copenhagen been reversed—with India’s per-capita emissions four times higher than China’s, and with India in the line of international fire—would Beijing have helped provide New Delhi diplomatic cover?

Mr. Chellaney, professor of strategic studies at the Centre for Policy Research in New Delhi, is the author of "On the Frontline of Climate Change: International Security Implications" (Konrad Adenauer Foundation, 2007).

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Why India Lost Out in Copenhagen

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India unwisely provided China cover

India, far from gaining anything by aligning itself with China at Copenhagen, only undercut its interest by getting bracketed with the world’s largest polluter and being made to accept mitigation obligations, writes Brahma Chellaney

Make no mistake: China, the world’s largest net polluter whose carbon emissions are growing at the fastest rate, was the principal target at Copenhagen, which has given its imprimatur to revising the climate-change regime. But China cleverly deflected pressure by hiding behind India and other developing countries. 

China, however, has little in common with India. With its carbon-intensive, manufacturing-based economy, China’s per-capita carbon emissions are four times higher than India’s. India, with its white-collar, services-driven economy, has the lowest per-capita emissions among all important developing countries. Although both countries seem to have similar competitive advantages, China’s rise has been on the back of an increasing export surge that has made it the world’s back factory for cheap goods, while India’s imports-dependent economy is carbon light, reflected in the fact that its per-capita emissions are just 26 per cent of the world average.

Yet, in the run-up to the Copenhagen summit, India signed a five-year understanding with China to present a united front in international climate-change negotiations, with the Indian minister of state for environment, in a hallucinatory loop of delusion, going to the extent of saying that there “is no difference between the Indian and Chinese negotiating positions.” What is the commonality between the two countries when China openly rejects India’s approach that per-capita emission levels and historic contributions to the build-up of greenhouse gases should form the objective criteria for carbon mitigation? China, as the world’s back factory, wants a different formula that marks down carbon intensity linked to exports.

Had the situation been the opposite — with India’s per-capita emissions four times higher than China’s, and with India in the line of international fire — would Beijing helped provide New Delhi diplomatic cover? India gained little by aligning itself with China at Copenhagen. Indeed, it ended up undercutting its interest by getting bracketed with the world’s largest net polluter and being made to accept mitigation action under international monitoring under undefined international monitoring. In the process, it has helped formulate, even if unintentionally, the broad terms for revising what admirably suits Indian interests — the existing climate-change regime.

The price for providing political cover to China at Copenhagen is that carbon-thin India got roped in to commit itself to mitigation when hundreds of millions of Indians have no access to most-basic rights: Electricity and safe water. Instead of a deal being struck between the world’s two largest polluters, the U.S. and China, the U.S. was forced to cut a deal with the BASIC bloc comprising Brazil, India, South Africa and China, because China expediently hid behind that banner. In fact, India has little in common even with South Africa and Brazil either in carbon or industrial-development level. While India’s per-capita emission was 1.2 tons in 2007, it was 9.4 in South Africa, 2.1 in Brazil and 4.8 in China, according to U.S. Energy Information Administration data.

India not only aligned itself with the wrong group, but also it presented itself inadvertently as a major global polluter by making common cause with China, whose developmental path threatens to unleash a carbon tsunami on the world. As China and India gain economic heft, it has become fashionable to internationally pair them. But these two demographic titans are a study in contrast on carbon intensity, with China now responsible for 24 per cent of global carbon emissions with 19.8 percent of the world population, but India’s current contribution not matching even half its population size. India indeed has more in common with the poor countries that cried foul over the U.S.-BASIC deal.

India would have done better at Copenhagen had it not associated itself so closely with China. It should have gone into the negotiations by consciously seeking to de-hyphenate itself from China, including by pointing out that China has more in common with the U.S. than with India. After all, the U.S. (currently responsible for 22 per cent of global emissions) and China, as the top polluters, have emerged as the key “problem states” in combating climate change.

But instead of de-hyphenating itself, India went into the negotiations as if it were joined at the hip with China, first by agreeing to put up a united stance and then by following in Beijing’s footsteps to unveil a plan to slash its carbon intensity by 2020. Not only was the target of 20 to 25 per cent reductions disproportionate to the level of Indian emissions, but it also made India ripe in Copenhagen for acceptance of mitigation action. In any case, it was poor negotiating strategy to announce such a major voluntary concession beforehand.

Past experience should have taught India that whenever it has joined hands with China on environmental issues, it has been let down by the Chinese proclivity to jettison principles and play power politics to serve its narrow interests. Take the Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer. In the negotiations, it teamed up India, only to reverse its stance and leave India in the lurch. It agreed to abide by the protocol if it were compensated for the compliance costs. That forced India eventually to take that very position, lest it stood out as a loner. Under the Kyoto Protocol, China — through international manoeuvring — has captured the bulk of the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) funding.

How much it suits China to be seen in the same class as India on carbon issues than with its real polluting peer, the U.S., was made clear by the post-Copenhagen telephone call the Chinese foreign minister made to his Indian counterpart to emphasize continuing Sino-Indian collaboration. But when it comes to global or Asian geopolitics, China insists India is in a junior league.

New Delhi can be sure that when criteria for mitigation action is defined in future negotiations, China will work to unduly burden India by insisting that weight be given to elements other than per-capita emission levels and historic contributions. Having unwittingly aided the Chinese game-plan in Copenhagen, India is set to come out a loser. Isn’t that precisely what India did on UN Security Council permanent membership? When the U.S. and Soviet Union offered India a permanent seat in 1955, Jawaharlal Nehru demurred, according to his own collected works, saying the seat rightfully belonged to China. Now, China is the main obstacle to India’s UNSC aspirations.

Brahma Chellaney, professor of strategic studies at the Centre for Policy Research, is the author of “On the Frontline of Climate Change: International Security Implications”.

(c) The Economic Times, January 7, 2009.

Copenhagen: A key step toward new climate-change regime

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Door opens to climate-change NPT

Brahma Chellaney

The Economic Times, December 22, 2009

The global climate negotiations in Copenhagen did
not produce an ambitious, legally binding action plan for reducing
greenhouse gas emissions. But Copenhagen did yield
something significant: It won political commitments from China, India,
Brazil and South Africa to
be part of the solution and thus to an overhaul of the present climate-change
regime, which puts the carbon-mitigation onus entirely on the developed
countries.

Future international negotiations would proceed on the basis of
these political commitments, enshrined in the so-called Copenhagen Accord. The
1997 Kyoto Protocol and the 1992 UN Framework Convention — the two legs of the
current regime — would become less relevant.

President Barack Obama’s 13 hours of negotiations in Copenhagen yielded a two-fold success for the U.S.: First,
the country which emits more than a fifth of the world’s greenhouse gases with
just 4.5 per cent of the global population escaped without making any binding commitment.
Second, Obama brought on board not only China,
Brazil and South Africa but also the much-poorer India, whose
per-capita emissions are far lower than any important developing country. India is to submit
to a universal system of transparently reporting on national mitigation actions.

Put simply, Copenhagen
generated not a new international protocol but the political framework to
revamp the existing climate-change regime. Changing the terms of negotiations
is essential to changing a regime. The Copenhagen Accord embodies the new
terms.

For the developed countries, this symbolizes success. There isn’t
even a passing reference in the Copenhagen Accord to historic contributions to the build-up of
greenhouse gases or to an objective criteria factoring in per-capita emission
levels.

For India, this has
meant a diplomatic climbdown from its negotiating stance. It has agreed to bear
an economic burden for combating climate change when hundreds of millions of Indians are
still mired in abject poverty.

The rich states, by securing
an interim accord tying their carbon cuts to burden-sharing with the
underprivileged, have opened the doors to the creation of an NPT on climate
change. Indeed, Obama, in his next major international move, is hosting a
summit meeting in April to strengthen the nuclear NPT.

The significant aspect, in
comparative terms, is that the most-powerful players want to reinforce the
nuclear non-proliferation regime but revamp the climate-change regime by
re-jiggering their legal obligations. So the key words are: Preserve, uphold
and strengthen the NPT regime, but update, rework and improve the
climate-change regime.

In other words, the NPT
regime is being treated as sacrosanct that cannot be tinkered with or amended, even
as the Copenhagen Accord presents the climate-change regime as an evolutionary
process open to overhaul. Given that the NPT regime predates the climate-change
regime by a generation and a half, one would have thought that it is the former
that needs updating, if any.

Having paid a heavy price to
the NPT regime, India
now has agreed to pay a price in a new climate-change regime. By contrast, China — a winner in the NPT regime because it first
concentrated, unlike India, on acquiring military muscle
— has less to lose in a new
climate-change regime. After all, as the world’s largest net polluter, China has more in common with the U.S. than India.

Copenhagen has shown that climate change is not just about science
but about geopolitics too. And in geopolitics, those with economic and military
muscle fare better.

Brahma Chellaney, professor of strategic studies at
the Centre for Policy Research, is the author of “On the Frontline of Climate
Change: International Security Implications.” 

Climate change: Risks to India’s national security

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Climate Risks to Indian National Security

Brahma Chellaney
From: Indian Climate Policy: Choices and Challenges, Edited By
David Michel and Amit Pandya (Washington, DC: Stimson Center, November 2009)

India may be a great power-in-waiting, but it probably lives in the world’s
worst neighborhood. Whichever way India looks, it sees crisis across its
frontiers. The tyranny of geography that India confronts is only getting worse,
putting greater pressure on its security. To this picture must now be added the
risks from climate change, which has been correctly identified as a threat
multiplier. What all this underscores is the need for the Indian republic to evolve
more dynamic and innovative approaches to diplomacy and national defense as
well as to build greater state capacity in order to meet contingencies.

Climate change, unfortunately, has become a divisive issue internationally before
a plan for a low-carbon future has evolved. At a time of greater international
divisiveness on core challenges – from disarmament and terrorism to the energy
crisis and the Doha Round of world trade talks – the world can ill afford political
rancor over a climate crisis that threatens to exacerbate security challenges.
While gaps in scientific knowledge make it easy to exaggerate or underestimate
the likely impact of climate change, three broad strategic effects can be
visualized in relation to India.

MULTIPLYING CLIMATE THREATS
1. Climate change would intensify interstate and intrastate competition over
natural resources, making resource conflicts more likely.

A new Great Game over water could unfold, given China’s control over the
source of most of Asia’s major rivers—the Plateau of Tibet. Accelerated melting
of glaciers and mountain snows would affect river water flows, although higher
average temperatures are likely to bring more rainfall in the tropics.

Intrastate water disputes already are endemic in Asia, with India being the most
prominent case. But it is the potential for interstate water conflict in Asia that
ought to be of greater concern because of the strategic ramifications.

Tibet’s water-related status in the world indeed is unique. No other area in the
world is a water repository of such size, serving as a lifeline for nearly half of the
global population living in southern and southeastern Asia and China. Tibet’s
vast glaciers, huge underground springs, and high altitude have endowed it with
the world’s greatest river systems. But China is now pursuing major inter-basin
and inter-river water transfer projects on the Tibetan plateau which threaten to
diminish international river flows into India and other co-riparian states. In fact,
China has been damming most international rivers flowing out of Tibet (Tibet’s
fragile ecosystem is already threatened by global warming). The only rivers on
which no hydro-engineering works have been undertaken so far are the Indus
(whose basin falls mostly in India and Pakistan), and the Salween (which flows
into Burma and Thailand.) Local authorities in China’s Yunnan province,
however, are considering damming the Salween in the quake-prone upstream
region.

Before such hydro-engineering projects sow the seeds of water conflict, China
ought to build institutionalized, cooperative river basin arrangements with
downstream states. Against this background, it is hardly a surprise that water is
becoming a key security issue in Sino-Indian relations and is a potential source of
enduring discord. India has been pressing China for transparency, greater
hydrological data-sharing, and a commitment not to redirect the natural flow of
any river or diminish cross-border water flows. But even a joint expert-level
mechanism – set up in 2007 merely for “interaction and cooperation” on
hydrological data – has proven of little value. The most dangerous idea China is
toying with is the northward rerouting of the Brahmaputra River, known as
Yarlung Tsangpo to Tibetans. Diversion of the Brahmaputra’s water to the
parched Yellow River is an idea that China does not discuss in public because the
project implies environmental devastation of India’s northeastern plains and
eastern Bangladesh and would thus be akin to a declaration of water war against
India and Bangladesh.

China and India already are water-stressed economies. The spread of irrigated
farming and water-intensive industries – together with the demands of a rising
middle class – have led to a severe struggle for more water. Indeed, both
countries have entered an era of perennial water scarcity. Rapid economic
growth could slow in the face of acute scarcity if the demand for water continues
to grow at its current frantic pace. Such a development would transform China
and India – both food-exporting countries – into major importers and would thus
exacerbate the global food crisis.

2. Higher frequency of extreme weather events (such as hurricanes, flooding,
and drought) and a rise in ocean levels are likely to spur greater interstate
and intrastate migration – especially of the poor and the vulnerable – from
the delta and coastal regions to the hinterlands.

Such an influx of outsiders would socially swamp inland areas and upset existing
fragile ethnic balances—provoking a backlash that strains internal and regional
security. It should not be forgotten that many societies in the region are a potent
mix of ethnicity, culture, and religion.

India, for example, could face a huge refugee influx from the world’s seventh
most populous country, Bangladesh. Having been born in blood in 1971,
Bangladesh faces extinction from saltwater incursion, with the International
Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) saying that country is set to lose 17 percent of
its land and 30 percent of its food production by 2050. Bangladesh today faces a
rising frequency of natural disasters. In addition to the millions of Bangladeshis
that already have illegally settled in India, New Delhi would have to brace up for
the potential arrival of tens of millions more people.

For India, the ethnic expansion of Bangladesh beyond its political borders not
only sets up enduring trans-border links, but it also makes New Delhi’s alreadycomplex
task of border management even more onerous. As brought out by
Indian census figures, Indian districts bordering Bangladesh have become
Bangladeshi-majority areas. It is perhaps the first time in modern history that a
country has expanded its ethnic frontiers without expanding its political borders.
“Climate refugees,” however, would not all come from across India’s borders.
Within India itself, those driven out by floods, cyclones, and saltwater incursion
would head for settlements on higher ground. In some cases, the effects of such
refugee influxes would be to undermine social stability and internal cohesion
locally.

3. Human security will be the main casualty as climate change delivers a major
blow to vulnerable economic sectors.

Economic and social disparities – already wide in Indian society – would
intensify. The fact that there is a Maoist insurgency in the poorest districts of
India at a time when the country is booming economically is a testament to the
costs of growing inequalities. That ragtag band of rebels wishes to supplant
Indian parliamentary democracy with a proletariat dictatorship inspired by Mao
Zedong’s Little Red Book.

The specter of resource competition, large-scale movement of “climate
refugees,” social and political tensions, and a higher frequency and intensity of
extreme weather events helps underscore the human-security costs. Climate
variability will bring change to the social-economic-political environments on
which the security of individuals and communities rest. Authorities – as well as
communities – will be forced to innovate and manage under a climate changedriven
paradigm. Building greater institutional and organizational capacity,
early-warning systems, more efficient irrigation practices, and new farm varieties
will all become necessary.

THE FRONTLINE OF CLIMATE CHANGE
Against this background, India is likely to find itself on the frontline of climate
change. To deal with these national security implications, India needs to frame
the concept of security more broadly and redefine its defense planning and
preparedness. Unconventional challenges – from transnational terrorism to
illegal refugee inflows – already have become significant in India’s security
calculus. India also needs to build greater state capacity – at federal, provincial,
and local levels – to tackle various contingencies and adapt to a climate changedriven
paradigm. Climate change holds the greatest risks for India in the
agricultural sector—a sector that employs half of the Indian workforce and yet
makes up just 18 percent of the GDP. The challenge of ensuring food security
and social stability demands greater national investments in rural infrastructure
and agriculture and also simultaneously requires finding a way to leapfrog to
green technologies.

A lot can be done to combat climate change outside any regime. India’s US$ 22
billion solar-energy program, US$ 2.5 billion forestation fund, and new national
energy-efficiency mission are initiatives in the right direction.

Internationally, though, Indian diplomacy must ensure that the country is not
saddled with unfair obligations that compound its challenges. Equity in burdensharing
has to be ensured. The challenge is to devise carbon standards that help
protect the material and social benefits of economic growth in the developing
world without damaging prosperity in the developed countries.

But just as the five original nuclear weapons states helped fashion the 1970
Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) to perpetuate their privileges, countries
that became wealthy early wish to preserve their prerogatives in a climate change
regime despite their legacy of environmental damage and continuing high carbon
emissions. This has raised the danger of rich nations locking in their advantages
by revising the 1992 Rio bargain and re-jiggering the Kyoto Protocol obligations
through a new regime. This could create another global divide between haves
and have-nots—an NPT of climate change. An enduring international regime to
combat global warming will have to be anchored in differential responsibility, a
concept at the heart of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate
Change and the Kyoto Protocol (it is a concept also embedded in international
law through several other agreements—from the Montreal Protocol on
Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer to the Treaty of Maastricht.) Climate
change, it is evident, is not just a matter of science but also a matter of
geopolitics.

China’s Hydra-Headed Hydropolitics

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The
Sino-Indian Divide Over Water

Brahma
Chellaney

A globally syndicated column. Copyright: Project Syndicate

As China and India gain economic heft, they are drawing
ever more international attention at the time of an ongoing global shift of
power to Asia. Their underlying strategic
dissonance and rivalry, however, usually attracts less notice.

As its power grows, China seems
determined to choke off Asian competitors, a tendency reflected in its
hardening stance toward India.
This includes aggressive patrolling of the disputed Himalayan frontier by the
People’s Liberation Army, many violations of the line of control separating the
two giants, new assertiveness concerning India’s northeastern Arunachal Pradesh
state — which China claims as its own — and vituperative attacks on India in
the state-controlled Chinese media.

The issues that divide India and China, however,
extend beyond territorial disputes. Water is becoming a key security issue in
Sino-Indian relations and a potential source of enduring discord.

China and India already are
water-stressed economies. The spread of irrigated farming and water-intensive
industries, together with the demands of a rising middle class, have led to a
severe struggle for more water. Indeed, both countries have entered an era of
perennial water scarcity, which before long is likely to equal, in terms of per
capita availability, the water shortages found in the Middle
East.

Rapid economic growth could slow in the face of acute
scarcity if demand for water continues to grow at its current frantic pace,
turning China and India — both food-exporting countries — into major importers,
a development that would accentuate the global food crisis.

Even though India has
more arable land than China —
160.5 million hectares compared to 137.1 million hectares — Tibet is
the source of most major Indian rivers. The Tibetan plateau’s vast glaciers,
huge underground springs and high altitude make Tibet the world’s largest
freshwater repository after the polar icecaps. Indeed, all of Asia’s major
rivers, except the Ganges, originate in
the Tibetan plateau. Even the Ganges’ two main tributaries flow in from Tibet.

But China is
now pursuing major inter-basin and inter-river water transfer projects on the
Tibetan plateau, which threatens to diminish international-river flows into India and
other co-riparian states. Before such hydro-engineering projects sow the seeds
of water conflict, China ought
to build institutionalized, cooperative river-basin arrangements with
downstream states.

Upstream dams, barrages, canals, and irrigation systems
can help fashion water into a political weapon that can be wielded overtly in a
war, or subtly in peacetime to signal dissatisfaction with a co-riparian state.
Even denial of hydrological data in a critically important season can amount to
the use of water as a political tool. Flash floods in recent years in two
Indian frontier states — Himachal Pradesh and Arunachal Pradesh — served as an
ugly reminder of China’s
lack of information-sharing on its upstream projects. Such leverage could in
turn prompt a downstream state to build up its military capacity to help
counterbalance this disadvantage.

In fact, China has
been damming most international rivers flowing out of Tibet, whose
fragile ecosystem is already threatened by global warming. The only rivers on
which no hydro-engineering works have been undertaken so far are the Indus,
whose basin falls mostly in India and Pakistan, and the Salween, which flows into Burma and Thailand. Local authorities
in Yunnan province, however, are
considering damming the Salween in
the quake-prone upstream region.

India’s government has been pressing China for
transparency, greater hydrological data-sharing, and a commitment not to
redirect the natural flow of any river or diminish cross-border water flows.
But even a joint expert-level mechanism — set up in 2007 merely for "interaction
and cooperation" on hydrological data — has proven of little value.

The most-dangerous idea China is
contemplating is the northward rerouting of the Brahmaputra river, known as
Yarlung Tsangpo to Tibetans, but which China has renamed Yaluzangbu.
It is the world’s highest river, and also one of the fastest-flowing. Diversion
of the Brahmaputra’s water to the parched Yellow river is an idea that China does not discuss in public, because
the project implies environmental devastation of India‘s northeastern plains and eastern Bangladesh, and would thus be akin to a
declaration of water war on India and Bangladesh.

Nevertheless, an officially blessed book published in
2005, Tibet’s Waters
Will Save China, openly championed the northward rerouting of the Brahmaputra. Moreover, the Chinese desire to divert the
Brahmaputra by employing "peaceful nuclear explosions" to build an
underground tunnel through the Himalayas found expression in the international
negotiations in Geneva in
the mid-1990s on the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT). China sought
unsuccessfully to exempt PNEs from the CTBT, a pact still not in force.

The issue now is not whether China will reroute the Brahmaputra, but when. Once authorities complete their
feasibility studies and the diversion scheme begins, the project will be
presented as a fait accompli. China already
has identified the bend where the Brahmaputra forms the world’s longest and
deepest canyon — just before entering India — as the diversion
point.

China’s ambitions to channel Tibetan waters northward
have been whetted by two factors: the completion of the Three Gorges Dam,
which, despite the project’s glaring environmental pitfalls, China trumpets as
the greatest engineering feat since the construction of the Great Wall; and the
power of President Hu Jintao, whose background fuses two key elements — water
and Tibet. Hu, a hydrologist by training, owes his swift rise in the Communist
Party hierarchy to the brutal martial-law crackdown he carried out in Tibet in
1989.

China’s hydro-engineering projects and plans are a reminder
that Tibet is
at the heart of the India-China divide. Tibet ceased
to be a political buffer when China annexed it nearly six decades
ago. But Tibet can
still become a political bridge between China and India. For that
to happen, water has to become a source of cooperation, not conflict.

Brahma
Chellaney is Professor of Strategic Studies at the Center for Policy Research
in New Delhi.

Copyright: Project
Syndicate, 2009.

http://www.project-syndicate.org/contributor/1629

Oil sheikhdoms and the rise of Islamist threat

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Oiling transnational terrorism

Oil prices are sure to rebound before long, ensuring that the Gulf sheikhdoms enjoy overflowing coffers and a growing heft to fund extremist groups, like the Lashkar-e-Taiba, long fattened with Saudi petrodollars, says Brahma Chellaney

The Economic Times, December 24, 2008

There is an inverse correlation between the price of oil and the price of freedom, as has been pointed out by American commentator Thomas Friedman. An oil-price spike not only spurs greater transfer of wealth to the oil-exporting nations, but also undercuts the spread of freedom by instilling or strengthening authoritarianism and arming the Gulf states with greater clout to fund fundamentalism and extremism elsewhere.

The current oil-price crash might create an illusion that the era of sky-high international prices is over. Before plummeting below $50 a barrel in November-end, the price of crude oil had gone from $30 in 2001 to as high as $147 in July 2008, creating an unprecedented bonanza for oil-exporting nations.

But for many oil-consuming states in the developing world, the high price of oil created an unfavourable balance-of-payments position. One such state, the terror-exporting Pakistan, has just been pulled back from the brink of bankruptcy through US munificence, including a $7.6 billion IMF bailout package announced on the eve of the Mumbai terrorist assaults. The precipitous drop in the oil price, on the other hand, spells trouble not only for petro-states like Russia, Iran, Venezuela and Bolivia, but also nations like Egypt and Jordan where gulf money has helped shore up strained economies.

When viewed against a long-term picture of demand and supply, the sudden price crash is just not sustainable. Compared to the 1974 level, the price of oil, if adjusted against inflation, ought to be about $100 a barrel today. Given that there are 159 litres in one barrel of oil, the current price of “black gold”, as oil is called, is indeed cheaper than that of bottled mineral water.

Unlike the oil-price increases in the 1970s and early 1980s — triggered by cartelization and deliberate supply restriction — the price spike in recent years arose from two fundamental factors: mounting demand, especially in the emerging economies; and the flattening of production in key non-OPEC countries.

Finding new sources of oil is already becoming harder, with the environment now more difficult geographically and geologically. Also, as history attests, every phase of cheaper oil prices has carried the seeds of the next price spike and energy shock. For example, when in 1985-86 the price crashed from $45 to $9, energy saving and efficiency fell out of fashion. Today, suppliers are already cutting back on production and postponing new projects.

In that light, the oil price is sure to rebound before long. However, even if the price were to stay ridiculously low at $50 a barrel, the oil sheikhdoms of the Gulf will still receive more than $350 billion a year at their current rate of production. And if the price spirals to $150, their oil revenue will surpass $1 trillion a year. Such continuous transfers of immense wealth to the sparsely populated sheikhdoms — which have more foreign workers than citizens — holds major long-term strategic implications, including for the global fight against fundamentalism and terrorism.

Soaring wealth, coupled with their control over the world’s most-bountiful oil resources, gives these weak, feudal, internally-troubled sheikhdoms a disproportionate clout in world affairs — a heft they have misused.

After the 1970s’ oil-price shocks opened the flow of rising revenues, several sheikhdoms began funnelling some of their earnings to the promotion of Wahhabi Islam, including the establishment of jihad-spouting madrassas overseas. It was not an accident that the rise of Islamic conservatism and extremism — from Morocco and Sudan to Malaysia and Indonesia — began from the 1980s with the aid of petrodollars. Today, funds continue to be channelled to Islamist groups.

Take the Al Qaeda-linked Lashkar-e-Taiba. Although it was established as a front organization of the Pakistani intelligence to bleed India, this Punjabi-dominated outfit has long been fattened with Saudi petrodollars. As Husain Haqqani, now Pakistan’s ambassador in Washington, put it in a 2005 article, the Lashkar-e-Taiba is a Wahhabist group, “backed by Saudi money and protected by Pakistani intelligence services”, that targets India, Israel and the US as “existential enemies of Islam”. 

From the United Arab Emirates’ sheltering of international fugitives and terrorism-financing conduit role to Saudi Arabia’s continued bankrolling of jihadist groups overseas, the oil sheikhdoms have shown contempt for international norms. Their post-9/11 promises to clean up their alleged philanthropic acts have not been fully honoured.

This state of affairs is simply intolerable. Can the security of secular, pluralistic states be allowed to be undermined by despots whose wealth and power flow from the gigantic oil reserves on which they sit, often by usurping the resources of minorities?

Saudi Wahhabi wealth has been built from Shiite resources. The two million Shiites of Saudi Arabia may constitute only up to 15 per cent of the national population. But they dominate the oases of Qatif and al-Hasa in the Eastern Province, the source of 90 per cent of Saudi oil production and the seat of the world’s greatest oil reserves. In Iraq, too, the oil resources are concentrated in non-Sunni areas. The US occupation has helped end, however inadvertently, the Iraqi Sunni domination of the majority Shiite population.

Take another Sunni-governed oil sheikhdom, Bahrain, where the Shiites form up to 75 per cent of the population. The Bahraini Sunni elites have cosy tribal affiliations with the Saudi elite (going to the extent of granting Bahraini citizenship to Saudi Sunnis on demand) but maintain a distance from the majority Shiite population at home. 

Shiites have been suppressed and treated as second-class citizens in a number of societies since the time the Prophet’s grandson, Hussein, was beheaded by Sunnis in A.D. 656. Today, there is a Shiite reawakening across West Asia, with Jordan’s King Abdullah II even raising the spectre of a “Shiite crescent” stretching from Iran and Iraq to Syria and Lebanon.

Given that the Sunni-run sheikhdoms plus Iran hold some two-thirds of the global oil reserves and that Saudi Arabia alone is projected by 2025 to produce more oil than Africa and the Caspian Sea basin combined, international security will be better served by actively promoting democratization in the region than by propping up tyrannical regimes such as the one run by the House of Saud. 

(The writer is a strategic affairs expert.)

(c) The Economic Times

Forestalling water conflict in Asia

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Beware of Water Wars

 

China’s hydro-engineering projects in Tibet raise serious concerns

 

Brahma Chellaney

The Times of India, November 24, 2008

 

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s disclosure that during his recent Beijing visit he raised the issue of international rivers flowing out of Tibet underscores the enormous implications of China’s hydro-engineering projects and plans. Through its control over the Tibet plateau, China controls the flow of several major river systems that are a lifeline to southern and southeastern Asia. Yet China is toying with massive inter-basin and inter-river water transfer projects. Its Great South-North Water Transfer Project is an overly ambitious engineering attempt to take water through manmade canals to its semi-arid north. The diversion of waters from the Tibetan plateau in this project’s third leg is an idea enthusiastically backed by President Hu Jintao, a hydrologist by training whose 1989 martial-law crackdown in Tibet helped facilitate his swift rise in the communist party hierarchy.

            Water is getting tied to security in several parts of the world. The battles of yesterday were fought over land. Those of today are over energy. But the battles of tomorrow will be over water. And nowhere else does that prospect look real than Asia, the largest and most densely populated continent that awaits a future made hotter and drier by global warming. According to a 2006 UN report, Asia has less fresh water — 3,920 cubic metres per person — than any other continent other than the Antarctica.

With the world’s fastest-rising military expenditures, most-dangerous hot spots and fiercest resource competition, Asia appears the most likely flash-point for water wars — a concern underscored by attempts by some states to exploit their riparian position or dominance. Riparian dominance impervious to international legal principles can create a situation where water allocations to co-riparian states become a function of political fiat.

Upstream dams, barrages, canals and irrigation systems can help fashion water as a political weapon — a weapon that can be wielded overtly in a war, or subtly in peacetime to signal dissatisfaction with a co-riparian state. Even denial of hydrological data in a critically important season can amount to the use of water as a political tool. Such leverage could in turn prompt a downstream state to build up its military capabilities to help counterbalance the riparian disadvantage.

Except for Japan, Malaysia and Burma, Asian states already face water shortages. A different water-related problem confronts some low-lying states like Bangladesh and the Maldives, whose very future of is at stake due to creeping saltwater incursion and frequent flooding. Bangladesh today has too much water, yet not enough to meet its needs. Born in blood in 1971, it faces the spectre of a watery grave.

China and India already are water-stressed economies. The spread of irrigated farming and water-intensive industries and a rising middle class are drawing attention to their serious struggle for more water. The two giants have entered an era of perennial water shortages, which before long are likely to parallel, in terms of per-capita availability, the Mideast scarcity. Their rapid economic growth could slow if their demand for water continues to grow at the present frenetic pace. Water shortages, furthermore, threaten to turn food-exporting China and India into major importers — a development that would seriously accentuate the global food crisis.

 

Even though India’s usable arable land is larger than China’s — 160.5 million hectares compared to 137.1 million hectares — the source of all the major Indian rivers except one is the Tibetan plateau. While the Ganges originates on the Indian side of the Himalayas, its two main tributaries flow in from Tibet. This is the world’s largest plateau, whose vast glaciers, huge underground springs and high altitude have endowed it with the greatest river systems. Almost all the major rivers of Asia originate there. Tibet’s status thus is unique: No other area in the world is a water repository of such size, serving as a lifeline for much of an entire continent.

 

In the stark words of Premier Wen Jiabao, water scarcity threatens the very “survival of the Chinese nation”. But in seeking to address that challenge, China’s gargantuan projects threaten to damage the delicate Tibetan ecosystem. They also carry seeds of inter-riparian conflict. The hydropolitics in the Mekong river basin, for example, can only get sharper as China, ignoring the concerns of downstream states, completes more upstream dams on the Mekong.

 

While making half-hearted attempts to stanch Indian fears about the prospective diversion of the Brahmaputra northward, Beijing has identified the bend where the Brahmaputra forms the world’s longest and deepest canyon, just before entering India, as holding the largest untapped reserves for meeting China’s water and energy needs. A Sino-Indian conflict over the sharing of the Brahmaputra waters, for instance, would begin no sooner than China begins to build the world’s largest hydropower plant on the river’s Great Bend. Upstream projects already have been held responsible for flash floods in Arunachal and Himachal Pradesh.

 

The way to forestall or manage water disputes in Asia is to build cooperative river-basin arrangements involving all riparian neighbours. Such institutional arrangements ought to centre on transparency, information sharing, pollution control and a pledge not to redirect the natural flow of trans-boundary rivers or undertake projects that would diminish cross-border flows. The successful interstate basin agreements (such as over the Indus, the Nile and the Senegal) are founded on such principles. In the absence of institutionalized cooperation over shared resources, peace will be the casualty in Asia as water becomes the new battleground.

 

The writer is a strategic affairs analyst.

 

 (c) Times of India, 2008.

Jakarta Post interview with Professor Brahma Chellaney

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Water, the future’s gold?

Jakarta Post, 09/30/2008

Attention is regularly paid to the energy crisis, especially in regards to world oil reserves — yet water continues to be taken for granted. Brahma Chellaney, a professor of strategic studies at the Center for Policy Research in New Delhi, India, talked about averting water wars in Asia during a recent water seminar in Bali. He spoke with The Jakarta Post’s Stevie Emilia about the looming threat of the water crisis.

The Jakarta Post: It seems like the energy problem gets more attention than the water crisis. What are your thoughts?

Chellaney: If you look at the world 25 years ago, people did not believe that energy would become a major concern internationally, that there would be competition for energy, and that energy sources would become scarce.

The issue 25 years ago was about the price of oil, not about oil scarcity, not about demand outstripping supply. People thought that more and more oil would be discovered and there would be enough oil for all of us until new technology was developed for generating energy, especially technology to harness nature to generate electricity, for example.

It is similar about water today. We take water for granted. We do not recognize that many parts of the world are experiencing water scarcity, especially in Asia.

Large parts of Asia are water-stressed and unless this issue is taken seriously and we manage over water resources wisely, I think in years to come we will face acute water scarcity that will affect our economic development and in turn, other aspects in our life — from public health to sanitation.

Are you suggesting the water problem be given more attention?

You see, the battle 50 years ago was fought over land. The battle of today is over energy. The battle of tomorrow will be fought over water.

So the question is, do we wait until tomorrow arrives or do we prepare to address water issues today in a more sensible way because to some extent, the water scarcity is caused by poor water management by countries.

Will there be any alternatives?

This is the big difference between energy and water. If the energy supplies stop, the economy stops. If water supplies stop, then life itself stops because water is essential to our very existence. It is essential to good health, it is essential for the economy. Without water, we cannot survive.

We have developed technology to harness nature, there is wind power, solar power and geothermal energy, but for water, we have no such substitute. Water is irreplaceable. So sensibly conserving water, recycling water, rainwater harvesting and drinking water management are the only choices we have. We have no other options.

What is the water situation in Asia today?

Per capita availability of water in Asia today is rivalling water scarcity in the Middle East. People do not realize this. Water scarcity in the Middle East is acute. In Asia, uneven distribution of water makes per capita availability of water in countries like China and India almost close to water scarcity in the Middle East.

Do you think Asians are aware of such a fact? I don’t think so, because water is an issue which is looked at on a sub-regional or sub-national level. Water scarcity in Thailand, for instance, is already an issue there, but it is not an issue that the whole of Thailand is looking at. The situation is similar in India.

People take water for granted. Sadly, water is not priced properly. There is no market price for water.

Water will become an increasingly competitive commodity. There will be competition for water sources, competition within countries and between countries. This can create potential for water-related tension and water conflicts. Water insecurity in general is a factor that will create instability and tension.

How can a water crisis trigger a war?

Some countries are located upstream on international rivers and such countries have the control over the water sources.

They can, for instance, fashion water into a weapon against countries located downstream. They can do it by building dams, canals and other facilities that divert waters or help to control water flow to a co-riparian state.

How can we avert a water war in Asia?

There are three things that can be done. First is to efficiently manage water resources by looking at long-term implications of water and security. Water management will have to be an important policy priority. As part of water management, we’ll have to look at water conservation, water efficiency, recycling and rainwater harvesting.

Second is to build institutional cooperation over the sharing of international rivers — there are 57 interstate river basins in Asia — to ensure there will be no conflicts over sharing of river waters from interstate basins.

Third is to set international rules to govern shared water resources. At present, international law is very weak, almost nonexistent on water issues. We need to create international norms or international legal principles on issues like sharing of water from interstate rivers and aquifers.

When should we start doing these three things?

We have to start doing these things because if we do not grapple with these issues now, then in 10 to 15 years from now, water-security issues will become a very destabilizing factor in Asia.

Copyright © 2008 The Jakarta Post – PT Bina Media Tenggara. All Rights Reserved.

Water, the potential new battleground in Asia

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Averting Asian water wars

By BRAHMA CHELLANEY
The Japan Times

As the most pressing resource, water holds the strategic key to peace, public health and prosperity. The battles of yesterday were fought over land. Those of today are over energy. But the battles of tomorrow will be over water. And nowhere else does that prospect look more real than in Asia.

According to a 2006 U.N. report, Asia has less fresh water than any other continent other than Antarctica. In that light, water is emerging as a key challenge for long-term Asian peace and stability.

Although water covers two-thirds of Earth, much of it is too salty for use. Barely 2.5 percent of the world’s water is potentially potable, but two-thirds of that is locked up in the polar icecaps and glaciers. So, less than 1 percent of the total global water is available for consumption by humans and other species.

These freshwater reserves are concentrated in mountain snows, lakes, aquifers and rivers. Already, 1.5 billion people lack ready access to potable water, and 2.5 billion people have no water sanitation services.

In Asia, deforestation, poor management of river basins, environmentally unsustainable irrigation, overuse of groundwater and contamination of water sources have all helped aggravate water woes. The over-exploitation of subterranean water has resulted in a falling water table in several parts of Asia.

Depleting groundwater irreplaceably can dry up wetlands and lakes that depend on such sources. Saline seawater can flow in to replace the fresh water that has been pumped out, as is happening in some Asian coastal areas. In the Gangetic Delta, wells have tapped into naturally occurring arsenic deposits, leading to tens of millions of people in eastern India and Bangladesh being exposed to high levels of arsenic in drinking water and staple agricultural products like rice.

In fact, access to water illustrates the divide today between the rich and the poor in Asia. While the poor struggle to get basic access to water for their daily consumption and household chores, the rich now largely rely on bottled drinking water.

The quality and quantity of available fresh water indeed is becoming a critical component of Asian security-related challenges. Increasingly, dams built on transnational rivers are spurring interstate friction. If wars in the future are to be averted over these and other hydro-engineering projects, international norms and rules will have to be evolved.

With the world’s fastest-rising military expenditures, most-dangerous hot spots and fiercest resource competition, Asia appears as the biggest flash point for water wars — a concern underscored by attempts by some states to exploit their riparian position or dominance. Riparian dominance impervious to international legal principles can create a situation where water allocations to co-riparian states become a function of political fiat.

Upstream dams, barrages, canals and irrigation systems can help fashion water as a political weapon — a weapon that can be wielded overtly in a war, or subtly in peacetime to signal dissatisfaction with a co-riparian state. Even denial of hydrologic data in a critically important season can amount to the use of water as a political tool. Such leverage could in turn prompt a downstream state to build up its military capabilities to help counterbalance the riparian disadvantage.

Except for Japan, Malaysia and Burma, Asian states already face water shortages. The very future of some low-lying states like Bangladesh and the Maldives is at stake due to creeping saltwater incursion, frequent storm-related flooding and the climate change-driven rise of ocean levels. Bangladesh today has too much water, yet not enough to meet its needs. Born in blood in 1971, the world’s seventh-most populous nation faces the specter of a watery grave.

China and India already are water-stressed economies. The spread of irrigated farming and water-intensive industries and a rising middle class are drawing attention to their serious struggle for more water. The two giants have entered an era of perennial water shortages, which before long are likely to parallel, in terms of per capita availability, the scarcity in the Middle East.

Their rapid economic growth could slow in the face of acute water scarcity if their demand for water continues to grow at the present frenetic pace. Water shortages indeed threaten to turn food-exporting China and India into major importers — a development that would seriously accentuate the global food crisis.

Even though India’s usable arable land is larger than China’s — 160.5 million hectares compared to 137.1 million hectares — the source of all the major Indian rivers except the Ganges is the Chinese-held Tibetan plateau. This is the world’s largest plateau, whose vast glaciers, huge underground springs and high altitude have endowed it with the greatest river systems.

Almost all the major rivers of Asia originate there. Tibet’s status thus is unique: No other area in the world is a water repository of such size, serving as a line for much of an entire continent.

Through its control over Tibet, China controls the ecological viability of several major river systems tied to southern and southeastern Asia. But today, China is toying with massive interbasin and inter-river water transfer projects starting from the Tibetan plateau.

Its ongoing "Great South-North Water Transfer Project" is an overly ambitious engineering attempt to take water through man-made canals to its semi-arid north. The diversion of waters from the Tibetan plateau in this project’s third leg is an idea enthusiastically backed by President Hu Jintao, a hydrologist who owes his swift rise in the Communist Party hierarchy to the brutal martial-law crackdown he carried out in Tibet in 1989.

In the stark words of Premier Wen Jiabao, water scarcity "threatens the very survival of the Chinese nation." But in seeking to address that challenge, China’s gargantuan projects threaten to damage the delicate Tibetan ecosystem. They also carry seeds of inter-riparian conflict. The hydropolitics in the Mekong River basin, for example, can only become worse as China, ignoring the concerns of downstream states, completes more upstream dams on the Mekong.

While making halfhearted attempts to staunch Indian fears about the prospective diversion of River Brahmaputra northward, Beijing has identified the bend where the Brahmaputra forms the world’s longest and deepest canyon, just before entering India, as holding the largest untapped reserves for meeting China’s water and energy needs.

A Sino-Indian conflict over the sharing of the Brahmaputra waters would begin no sooner than China began to build the world’s largest hydropower plant on the river’s Great Bend.

Asia will continue to have the largest number of people without basic or adequate access to water. Such water stress in the face of rising demand and poor water management will sharpen competition between urban and rural areas, between neighboring provinces and between nations. As global warming accelerates, local, national and interstate disputes over water will become increasingly common in Asia, making cooperative institutional mechanisms over water resources essential within and between states.

Clearly, the way to forestall or manage water disputes in Asia is to build cooperative river-basin arrangements involving all riparian neighbors. Such institutional arrangements ought to center on transparency, information sharing, pollution control and a pledge not to redirect the natural flow of transboundary rivers or undertake projects that would diminish cross-border water flows. The successful interstate basin agreements (such as over the Indus, the Nile and the Senegal rivers) are founded on such principles.

In the absence of institutionalized cooperation over shared resources, peace would be the casualty in Asia if water became the new battleground. In the ominous words of Wang Shucheng, China’s former minister of water resources: "To fight for every drop of water or die, that is the challenge facing China."

 
Brahma Chellaney is a professor of strategic studies at the privately funded Center for Policy Research in New Delhi.
 
The Japan Times: Thursday, Oct. 2, 2008
(C) All rights reserved

Coping Strategically With Climate Change

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Treat Climate Change As Matter of Security

 

Brahma Chellaney

Covert magazine, October 1-14, 2008

 

Unlike other unconventional challenges the world faces, climate change is caused not by hostile forces but by our production and consumption patterns. For long, global warming had not been taken seriously, and even the few who did see its threat potential, viewed the matter as simply an environmental or economic issue. Today the silver lining is the ongoing attitudinal shift one sees in countries — from the United States and Australia, to China and Brazil. A prerequisite to any policy shift is an attitudinal shift. In the coming years, we will, hopefully, see policy shifting both at the national and international levels to help promote climate security.

 

Of course, without a change in U.S. policy, no international counteraction plan can emerge. Given President George W. Bush’s history of obstructionism on this issue despite a grudging admission by him of the human-induced causes of global warming, a more forward-looking U.S. approach would have to await a change of administration in Washington. In the developing world, the attitudinal shift is mirrored in the decision by a number of states to go in for energy-efficiency measures and climate-friendly technologies. The national action plans unveiled by China and India reflect this attitudinal shift. Limiting the scale of the climate problem is paramount. But as history testifies, action does not begin until a widely recognized crisis dawns on the world. And when that happens, it is the political ideas already around that get embraced. So now is a good time to begun formulating practicable proposals to combat climate change.

 

Fortunately, there is now greater clarity in the world on what needs to be controlled in order to protect the climate. The science of climate change is better developed, although it remains young, with some issues still unsettled. The economics of combating climate change is also now better understood, with the cost-benefit ratio clearly in favour of undertaking counteraction now. It is the politics that continues to lag behind, even as carbon emissions continue to grow 1.8 per cent annually. If the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere were to be capped by 2030 at 400 parts per million so that the average temperature does not rise beyond 2 degrees Celsius, then concerted global action cannot be put off indefinitely.

 

Climate policy alone, however, will not solve the climate crisis. Unless we address energy issues, we cannot effectively combat climate change. Today, four-fifths of the world’s energy comes from fossil fuels — coal, oil, natural gas. Given that nearly two-thirds of the greenhouse-gas emissions are due to the way we produce and use energy, we need to focus more on alternate energy policies. This imperative is also being underlined by the manner interstate competition over energy resources is noticeably influencing strategic thinking and military planning. Until we can either replace fossil fuels with cost-effective renewables or other alternative technologies or find practical ways to capture C0² emissions, the world would remain wedded to the fossil-fuel age.

 

While the reluctance of the rich countries to accept any diminution in their lifestyle comforts is understandable, there is a need to go beyond symbolic approaches. The diversion of food for biofuels, for instance, has only helped create a windfall for major farm industries while burdening the world’s poor. Also, buying carbon credits from poor states to exceed one’s own emission targets is environmental grandstanding, at best, and carbon colonialism, at worst. The Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), set up under the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, has accomplished little more than re-jigger emission rights between the developed and developing worlds.

 

            The hope was that such carbon trading would allow emission cuts to happen where they are the cheapest. But the evidence thus far is that it has done little more than provide a greener reputation to the states promoting the scheme. The global market in carbon trading now is nearing $40 billion. The bulk of the carbon trading involves the sale of allowances under the European Union’s emissions trading scheme.

 

To deal with its strategic implications, climate change needs to be embraced as a national security issue — but not in the way the Pentagon has toyed with the development of weather-modification technologies for military applications. Countries, especially in the developing world, ought to start seriously looking at ways they can innovate and get along in a climate change-driven paradigm. It will become imperative to build greater institutional and organizational capacity, along with efficient water management, early warning systems and new farm varieties.

 

Brahma Chellaney is Professor of Strategic Studies at the Centre for Policy Research, New Delhi.